Rutanya Alda has made a deeply personal film about her family becoming war refugees (WWII) and the six years afterwards in the Allies' "Displaced Persons" camps, experiencing starvation, sickness, living in rubble, witnessing such things as a woman lay down on the tracks and her body parts flying in the air, an image that haunted Alda for years into adulthood. This documentary is told from her point of view as a child, of what she saw and witnessed while growing up. It is also the story of her grandmother who was determined to survive Hitler and then afterward struggle to survive the refugee camps among 12 million starving people searching for food and living in bombed out buildings. This documentary also parallels her father's journey, a man who served in the Red Army and who returns from fighting the Japanese in August of 1945 only to be snatched off the street at gunpoint, stuffed into a cattle car with many other men, and sent to Stalin's forced labor camps, called the Gulag.
Many people don't know about this time in history. The Ukraine crisis has awakened some. Understanding unending wars' unique destruction to children and families is what Rutanya hopes to communicate. Most stories about WWII are told about the historical battles but not about the aftermath of women and children.
